Bleep

Musician and producer Lyra Pramuk is a true enigma of modern music; a creator of immense sensitivity with an ability to convey deep intimacy through sound, and yet conversely, a rather slippery, chameleonic figure spanning multiple boundaries (classical and electronic music being the all-too-simple categorisation; the organic and the post-human being a fittingly nuanced description).

Her debut album Fountain, (one of Bleep's Top 10 Albums of 2020), was named for a translation of her Czech family name, treads the personal and the abstract with operatic vocalisations and completely unknowable forms of studio magick — its follow-up, Delta, conversely incorporates a plethora of input from guests and well-wishers to craft a remix album in essence and a wholly singular, collaborative ‘second LP’ in its own right.

Pramuk’s curatorial sensibility is boundless across the myriad approaches of Delta, her striking vocal performance contorted into jagged, pseudo-ambient swells by Valgeir Sigurðsson and Colin Self, who each triangulate her minimalist ethos and distort her unique timbre into an eerie, synthesised tone machine. While ‘Tendrils’ is fashioned into something like a transcendent club tune performed by a quartet of singing automatons, Eris Drew’s two entries flip the switch from the menacing wails of ‘Sugarcube Revelations’ to the techie digi-drum n dub of ‘Everything is Beautiful & Alive’.

Just like the title of that song, Delta is testimony to the gorgeousness and vivacity of Pramuk’s work, her raw materials evidently sparking with potentialities of eternal life long after they’ve been committed to wax.